Natural Fiber
A poem about apprehension
There are two sources of inspiration that should be credited for the following poem. The first is The American Revolution by Ken Burns, which I watched recently with my husband and father and recommend (as I recommend all his work). The second is Caroline Ross’ excellent substack Uncivil Savant. Caroline is an artist whose particular focus is crafting art out of natural, found materials, and I find both her work and her perspective a nice “antidote to the hubriscene” as she puts it. With this documentary and her work swirling around in my head, I wrote the following poem.
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Natural Fiber
Shadowed evening spent in the TV’s flickering. Its light shows us a Revolutionary War documentary. It is produced beautifully, compiled with obvious great care— hand-drawn maps scrolling to the rally-beat of breath -filled fifes, the lament of cradled fiddles, shots of contemporary re-enactors in perfect period kit, each garment authentic and I marvel at the recognizability, even now, even through the drone shots of their forest marches, and the surety of so many human beings rigid at computers, their fingers stroking and grasping the static, uniform plastic required to manifest these images in my home. The boots are leather and so plainly hand-wrought I can sense the awl’s handle, globed and smooth, in my palm. The gaiters, held taught with buttons roughed by tarnish, a wool so real and normal, my fingers feel the felt, I know without seeing that the living sheep existed, a fleece of fibers haloed around each of their ordinary bodies. Every individual item worn on every drumming chest, every weary, lice -scabbed, frost-bitten limb, every scrap of canvas and linen, of leather, wood and wool, the origin and make known, detectable, even on those black and frigid nights, lit only by fire and the sun’s many reflections—the moon, the fog, the ice— the fingers knew what they were touching as do my eyes, despite so many bafflements— the screens that channel such offerings, these bright and artificial nights.